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Comment by iainctduncan | Hacker News Reader

PHP did well for ONE reason: it was really, really, really easy to deploy. This was, of course, underestimated by programmers in the know, but I remember first getting into web dev, and I could start putting real programs (!!!) on the web, in minutes!

I would say it was more like the bicycle. Cheap, no license, even a kid could be suddenly zooming around town with no ceremony, no red tape, minimal investment.

I haven't used it in well over a decade, but still remember fondly how great it was as a gateway drug to bigger and better things.

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Can't upvote this enough. Zero friction is like superconductivity: a huge, qualitative jump. If doing the key thing is trivially, absurdly easy, people will readily excuse whatever shortcomings the product may have, be it a specialist tool like Docker, or a mass-audience service like Twitter.

(Do one thing, but do it well; sounds familiar?)

Yep. I was doing Perl CGI scripts at the time, and you often ran into deployment issues somewhere along the line of uploading the scripts via FTP, making them executable, and setting the permissions on any files that needed to be written. Building PHP into the web server instead of external CGI scripts eliminated a lot of that, so it was more likely to just work without some back-and-forth with a web admin to get things setup right for CGI to work. It wasn't the language, but the way it was deployed.

Yes! This was huge. You could go from coding to uploading to refreshing your application as fast as you could perform those actions. And don’t forget, with Perl CGI, you had to output the right Content-Type header (and two carriage returns) at the top of your outputted page content for the browser to even parse it correctly.

of all the reams of php snark the internet has produced, one line has stuck in my mind - "any fool could write php, and many did". both because it was funny, and because that lowered barrier to entry is actually a good thing. I want "any fool" to be able to program and if php supports that goal, more power to it.

That's not entirely true.

It just moved the work somewhere else, generally an Apache config on a shared host. The user could very often just dump some PHP files in place and they'd be served up, but if you had to set up a new host then it was as fiddly as anything else.

This pattern also meant dropping everything the docroot, using .htaccess to hide things, having different behaviour depending on the global php.ini. All architectures had to be mashed into a request/response cycle (and anything more complex was no longer just drop the files in). It was a very long way from the idea of reproducable builds.

I agree it was popular, but not really for the right reasons.

Oh come on, it was waaay easier for beginners to set up than Java, Python, Ruby,or Perl at the time. Not even comparable.

Exactly. I remember that at the time, the alternative was the nightmare of setting up tomcat, Jboss, etc and dealing with all that bullshit.

Thanks God most of us didn’t have to deal with that enterprise crap for long, and in my case it was thanks to PHP too.

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